Tired of eating leftover meat loaf in Queens, New York, Buchwald, a 22-year-old budding journalist in 1948, landed in Paris and talked his way into becoming restaurant and nightclub reviewer for the Paris bureau of the New York Herald Tribune. His celebrated ""Paris After Dark"" column, plus interview pieces, launched his career. Both irreverently funny and deeply touching, this golden memoir (a sequel to Leaving Home) gloriously recreates the adventurous, liberated spirit of expatriate Paris, as Buchwald hobnobs with Janet Flanner, E.B. White, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Thornton Wilder, and recalls brief encounters with Picasso, Hemingway, Orson Welles, Mike Todd, Audrey Hepburn, Roy Cohn. He also met and in 1952 married Ann McGarry, an Irish American couture apprentice from Pennsylvania, and they adopted three children as Buchwald overcame self-doubts engendered by his unstable foster-home childhood. The book's second half recalls trips to Rome, London, Moscow, Warsaw, Istanbul and his return to the U.S. in 1963, but this travelogue pales beside the Paris section, which magically makes the reader feel young and hopeful. 100,000 first printing; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour. (Sept.)